Thursday, 7 June 2012

What a difference a few weeks makes...

It's been a fun few weeks since I last sat down and wrote something on here. Though I feel I should send out a disclaimer warning to start this one off saying that I'm ridiculously tired, the screen is already blurry despite looking at it for just a few minutes, and there's a solid chance I'll wake up in an hour with a string of letters and "words" on the page. If that happens, I'm still posting it. Maybe there'll be something wise in my sleepy writing.

*I've been writing this in bits and pieces over the space of about a week. A lot has been happening in this time (well, I like to think it's quite a lot...it may seem relatively insignificant to you) so please, bear with me*

Also, the last entry ended up being the most-read entry since I started this page. I don't know whether that means you all enjoy reading about my misery, everyone does love me (deep....DEEP down) or, as is most likely the case, people think what happened sucks. It did. It does. But life goes on.

Credit where credit is due to Dr. Harrington, who I've never called by that form of his name before. Seriously, Giles has been utterly fantastic in the last two weeks or so in helping me out and trying to find something else for my year abroad. After initially suggesting that there might be something in Frankfurt, that didn't quite work out and I thought that it would leave me studying for the year. Then in what could be a wonderful stroke of luck, I bumped into him just after he'd got an email from euroShell in Hamburg saying a vacancy had come up.

After a quick couple of modifications to the cover letter and sending that off, I got an email from Giles a day or two later asking if I'd be able to do an interview with them...in Hamburg.

Mega.

So that means that last Thursday, I spent the day being pretty busy on a day trip to Hamburg for an interview. I may have been feeling a bit worse for wear after barely sleeping during the previous few nights, but that's just part of life. You quickly learn to adapt to these things and get on with what you've got to do. I was still able to grab an hour of sleep while travelling...but by Thursday night I was definitely starting to go a little bit insane from lack of sleep.

Hamburg was pretty cool. Well, what I saw of it...which admittedly wasn't a lot. Still, the interview went well. The conversation flowed, I didn't embarrass myself while speaking German and held up my end of the deal to a level that I wasn't really expecting myself to be able to. I think that's something I've picked up and improved on while not really improving confidence-wise. I can speak German, but I can say a lot more than I actually think I can.

Let's just fast-forward a few days though. That was last week...this is now. And I indeed get offered the job in Hamburg. I'm still waiting for the contracts to come through, but the offer was made and accepted. Obviously, I'm ridiculously happy to have this sorted out, especially since I had pretty much given up all hope of landing a job for September and was starting to put serious consideration into looking at modules. Hamburg will be really good for me too. It's a good job, it might open some doors for me and I'll pick up more experience in a variety of fields than I would have found in my other job.

So things are pretty good. The positive energy paid off and things are starting to pick up. I would go into some sort of huge list of thanking people for helping me out and sticking by me while I was a bit of a grumpy old man (or more of a grumpy old man than usual). The positive energy paid off, whether it was my own view of staying positive or that of friends, teaching staff, family, housemates, people on Twitter...whoever. You really helped me. Thanks.

This is a bit of a strange one...since I started writing this almost a week ago and I've only just got round to finishing it for a variety of reasons, there's already another entry that I want to be writing, so we could be getting two entries in a day. More likely though is that I'll post the next entry in the next day or two. So keep your eyes peeled.

Thanks for the support and encouragement, I can't be who I am without you.

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About Me

I'm a German student at the University of Leeds.
Like everyone else, I'm on a journey through life. On this blog, I'll write about good things, bad things and random thoughts and ideas that I have in my head. Whether you read every single entry I write, or just read select entries, I hope you enjoy reading them and get to know a little bit about me.